Tuesday, September 05, 2017

motherboard.vice | It is an absolute certainty that, with sufficient thought, a new
mechanism may someday be designed, capable of integrating thousands of
talented individuals and existing organizations into a sort of parallel
civic ecosystem.

What is the proper role, then, for the citizen who takes citizenship
seriously, and counts it a duty to defend the rights not just of
Americans but of those populations abroad who ultimately bear the brunt
of our civic failings? For many, the answer is to continue the hard work
of engaging within the system—voting, working for better candidates,
donating time and money to the organizations that do what they can to
prevent things from deteriorating even further. This is entirely
appropriate. But even the reformers are likely to recognize, now, that
this may not be sufficient in the face of the political conditions we
face—and that the consequences of a morally failed American republic,
continuing on its present course for even just another decade, would be
irreparable. No competent observer of our current trajectory can today
disregard this scenario, or others far worse.

That this problem is now widely recognized is the first of two reasons why a solution is now in reach.

Here we have the second reason why a solution is now within reach. The
most important fact of the 21st century is that any individual can now
collaborate with any other individual on the planet. This has happened
with extraordinary suddenness, in historical terms; by the same
accounting, it has also happened quite recently, and so remains largely
unexplored. We cannot hope to know what this means as of yet, then, any
more than someone who observed the advent of the printing press or
gunpowder could have predicted, respectively, the Reformation or
Europe's eventual seizure of much of the world. Nonetheless, the
implications are becoming clearer as the years proceed; the internet
itself has quickened the pace of our history, even as it makes the
future more unpredictable.

pursuanceproject | For the first time in history, any individual may now collaborate with
any other individual. One may get a sense of the implications of this by
considering how different human history would have been had early man
possessed some psychic ability to find and communicate with anyone else
across the world. We now have something very similar, and in some ways
more powerful.

It's easy to underestimate the significance of this in part because it's
also easy to overestimate it and, worse, to romanticize it. The advent
of the internet was immediately followed by triumphalist manifestos
setting out the great and positive changes that were now afoot. That
much of what was predicted didn't immediately come to pass has led some
to challenge the entire premise of the internet as a potentially
revolutionary force for good.

Certainly the utopian predictions of the early ‘90s were off the mark;
indeed the clearest picture we have today contains seeds of actual
dystopia. Meanwhile, the trivial uses to which the internet is commonly
put can make it difficult to take seriously as a transcendental factor
in our civilization. But then gunpowder was originally used to make
fireworks. And a technology that may be used to oppress may also be used
to liberate. Again, gunpowder comes to mind.

The way in which events have proceeded in our society since the advent
of the internet tells us less about the internet than it does about our
society. There are a few lessons we can glean, though. In the large, we
know that mass connectivity does not automatically lead to mass
enlightenment. We know that states will sometimes seek to use the
internet to further their control over information, and that they will
sometimes be successful in this. We know many things of this sort. But
none of this tells us what the internet will ultimately mean for human
civilization. That will be determined on the ground, in the years to
follow.